Archive - Jun 2011

The Status Quo consensus is that "kicking the can down the road" a.k.a. "extend and pretend" will work because "Greece, Spain, Ireland et al. are going to "grow their way out of debt." That is a fantasy. Once a household or nation is burdened with stupendous debt loads and stagnating earnings, "growing your way out of debt" is impossible. The E.U. may succeed in strong-arming Greece into swallowing even more debt, more austerity and higher interest payments, but that will only speed up the self-reinforcing dynamics of insolvency, and guarantee the losses kicked down the road for a few months will be even more devastating.

Two notable observations in market technicals: first, from the NYSE, May margin debt declined for the first time since the May 2010 flash crash, and after peaking at $320.7 billion in April, the May sell off saw hedge funds and other levered investors modestly contract their gross leverage to $315.4 billion. Additionally, net leverage, or total net credit aka investor net worth, increased modestly from an all time record low of ($75) billion to ($67) billion. Still, leverage is at very precarious level should the ongoing drop in asset prices be met with an actual cash outflow in the form of redemptions. Which brings us to the second observations: according to ICI, domestic equity mutual funds, saw an 8th straight week of outflows in the week ended June 15, with the mount hitting $6.9 billion, or the highest in not only 2011, but the highest since September of 2010. Year to date nearly $10 billion in redemption requests have hit funds, meaning the only saving grace to an all out liquidation would be an increase in asset prices, which however now that additional monetary easing is off the table, will be a very difficult accomplishment. Incidentally, since the beginning of 2010, equity mutual funds have seen total withdrawals to the tune of $108 billion: not a great amount in the grean scheme of centrally planned things, but quite substantial nonetheless.

There's a reason yesterday's announcement that JPM Chase would 'settle' for a fine of $156.3 million, while neither admitting nor denying any wrong-doing, thereby forking over the whopping equivalent of a normal person's weekly grocery budget, pisses people off. Because it's a marginal fleabite on the teflon hand of the nation's second largest bank in terms of punitive pain, and absolutely meaningless in altering the grand scheme of toxic securities creation or complex financial institution business as usual.

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 22/06/11

Culture, culture, culture...it's the culture you Eurocratic dopes!

From Goldman's Jan Hatzius, who was probably typing while he was being interviewed by CNBC: "Fed Chairman Bernanke’s press conference included many details but few major surprises. On activity, he expressed relatively low conviction, saying “We don't have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting” (note that quotes come from the real-time transcript, which may be revised slightly). However, consistent with the FOMC’s forecasts (see below), he emphasized that he thought that some factors restraining growth were temporary."

"Sheu, an optimistic and philosophical man, often compared the United States with his original home in communist China. He told his associates and others that while in China whistleblowers were usually killed or imprisoned, he was certain that in the United States of America those pursuing justice would ultimately prevail. With this philosophy, Sheu was confident that if his story were known by the press and authorities, no one would dare harm him." It appears he was wrong...

Here comes the headless horseman cavalry:

• SCHUMER SAYS SENATE DEMOCRATS WEIGH TAX REPATRIATION HOLIDAY
• SCHUMER WOULD USE REVENUE FROM HOLIDAY FOR INFRASTRUCTURE JOBS

How the second sound bite makes any sense, we will need to ask someone with a full frontal lobotomy. What revenue? Where it is coming from? Doesn't Schumer have some Chinese currency manipulation bill he has to be submitting to Senate for the nth time instead of boosting multinational EPS through buybacks, while killing even more US jobs? Luckily it was just yesterday that we discussed that this whole process will do nothing at all to boost jobs as captured best by
Kristin J. Forbes, an MIT economics professor who was on the Bush team
back when the Homeland Investment Act in 2005 was enacted, who said: "For every dollar that was brought back, there were zero cents used for additional capital expenditures, research and development, or hiring and employees wages." Another economic disaster in the making, brought to you by the clueless captain of this country.

Imagine being told that you need to do something in life and you attempt to do it, but the person that’s very insistent that you do X takes his other hand and actively goes out of his/her way to prevent you from attaining X while each passing moment in time said person begins to label you as “lazy” or not trying hard enough?

As noted in the title, for all those who wish to reread how Bernanke justifies the fact that he has no idea why the economy will improve, but it just will, damn it, here it is, complete with the full Q&A.

While hypnotized lemmings are watching the green, red and blue squiggly lines, and Bernanke's lies enter one ear and exit from the other, those who put on the risk-ES spread convergence trade on earlier just paid for drinks. Spread has closed and we eagerly await the next free money opportunity from B to the Sack.

It will be a fun experiment to see if we can truly strip a government down to the singular function of taxing the citizens to give money to banks - consider it a practice run for their vision of the US.

The Fed has just taken one small step to acknowledging reality... and Zero Hedge's keyword of 2011: stagflation. The FOMC  released its revised 2011-2013 economic forecast, which saw GDP getting slashed, while hiking its inflation and unemployment projections. Specifically, 2011 GDP was lowered from 3.2% to 2.8% even as it raised its average unemployment forecast from 8.6% to 8.8%.

Just as expected, the New York Fed disclosed that even as QE2 is being halted (briefly), QE Lite purchases of maturing securities will continue, across the Fed's 7 maturity segments: "At this time, the Desk anticipates conducting one operation per month in each maturity sector." As we have calculated before the total amount of monthly "flow" purchases will be about $32 billion, and likely declining, as less and less MBS are prepaid to the Fed. In other words, the bulk of purchases will once again be at the belly, with the least amount dedicated to the long-end, followed only by the 1.5-2.5 year segment, which however, if Bill Gross is right, will see a surge in activity as soon as Operation Twist 2 is announced at this year's Jackson Hole meeting.

At 2:15 pm the general public will watch with fascination as Ben Bernanke descends into his throne, in his dollar green Vera Wang wearing a stunning Control Print and Arpels tungsten necklace, following with trepidation each and every shake and quiver of his chin in those ultra rare instances when he speaks the truth. He will be surrounded by a cohort of FOMC preapproved sycophants who, as can be seen on the clip below, are now on page 2 of Monetary Policy for Dummies, which they started reading back on April 27 during the first ever FOMC press conference. As usual, nothing of significance will be asked, and most certainly, answered, but do expect the dollar (and, inversely, ES) to go up, then down, then up, and so forth as random vacuum tubes blow in NYSE's ultramodern Mahwah collocation facility.